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The United States retains many aspects of a healthy open society, but there are indicators of trouble and deep divisions around the meaning and importance of democratic values. This debate has significant repercussions for universities and their academic communities. In the most-simple terms, there is a red and blue state divide over the role and importance of public institutions, including universities -- red representing largely rural states in which most voters vote Republican and blue being majority Democratic voters, often with one of the two parties having majorities in their respective state legislatures. Then there are so-called purple states in which both parties are vying for dominance, but they are fewer in number. This brief discusses this contemporary dynamic and its implication for higher education and science policy.

Since establishing its first campus in 1868, the University of California (UC), California's land-grant university, developed into the nation's first multi-campus system in the United States, and is today widely recognized as the world's premier network of public research universities. This short essay provides an historical brief on the role that shared governance, and specifically the role of the Academic Senate, played in creating an academic culture of excellence and high achievement in pursuing its tripartite mission of teaching and learning, research and knowledge production, and public service. A key component in understanding the critical role of the Senate in UC's evolution from a single campus in Berkeley to now a ten-campus system is the university's unusual designation as a public trust in the state constitution that, beginning in 1879, protected the university at critical times from external political pressures and allowed the university to develop an internal academic culture guided by the Academic Senate. By the 1920s, the emergence of California's unique and innovative public system of higher education, with UC as the sole public provider of doctoral degrees and state funded research, also helps explain the ability of the UC system to maintain its mission and formulate what is termed a "One University" model. The Academic Senate has created coherency and shared values within UC, and a culture and expectation for faculty performance that is unique among universities around the world. This essay also offers a brief reflection on the Academic Senate's past influence, its current status, and prospective role. The overall intent is to provide context for the current academic community and higher education scholars regarding the past and future role of faculty in university governance and management, and what distinguishes UC in the pantheon of major research universities.